Clarence Johnstone and Turner Layton teamed up in 1924 and first
appeared in London in an Elsie Janis revue, they were booked to appear
in a cabaret before going home, and this time caught the ear and eye of a
recording executive who signed them up to a contract, written out on
the back of a menu card then and there, and for over eleven years they
made records of all the best popular songs of what has since become
known as the Golden Age of the Dance Bands (and by this, the Golden Age
of the Popular Songs). Turner Layton was already quite well-known in New
York as the composer of such very popular standards as After You've
Gone, Dear Old South Land, Strut Miss Lizzie and Way Down Yonder In New
Orleans. After the partnership broke up in November, 1935, he continued
as a solo act, recording regularly until 1948. Johnstone returned to New
York, and died in obscurity there after eking out an existence as a
bell-boy in a hotel; Layton stayed in London until his death, well into
his eighties, in February I978. The twenty numbers on this disc were
made between the end of 1925, at the outset of electric recording
(although the singers' first records together were made by the old
acoustic method of singing into a long metal horn) and the late summer
of 1933. It offers a cross section of the kind of songs that were
popular then, in all the various styles, from the extrovert Stein Song
that swept the country in the summer of 1930 to the tenderness of
Ramona, which did likewise just two years earlier.
